Jothi Ramalingam founded CRUSADE (Centre for Rural Systems and Development) in 1991 to work with poor and marginalized women in his native area, Minjur, about 40 km north of Chennai. Later the Tamil Nadu Women's Development Corporation asked CRUSADE to take on part of neighbouring Sholavaram community development block. It now works with a total population of about 200,000, one third of whom are from marginalized dalit (untouchable, scheduled caste) communities, in 60 panchayats.

Vision and Mission
CRUSADE's vision is to create a just order through non-violent means by providing equality of opportunity to all. To this end, poor and marginalized women are organised into self-sustaining viable self-help groups (SHGs). Strengthening these people's organisations through capacity building for sustainability and linking all development activities is CRUSADE's mission.

Strategy
Women's self-help groups are formed around the theme of savings and credit. The 12-20 women in each group:

• elect their own leaders (the group leader is known as an animator),
• meet regularly,
• save an agreed amount and pay a membership fee on a weekly or monthly basis
• lend the pooled amount to members at an interest rate agreed by the group
• open a bank account to keep their surplus money
• and keep their own records on meetings and financial transactions

Once a new group has stabilised, CRUSADE trains its members in group management and begins to link the group to its other activities, credit for income generation, housing, literacy, health awareness, sanitation and local democracy. The SHGs are federated at panchayat, cluster and block level to create a self-sustaining institutional structure.

Changing Society
CRUSADE's SHGs are gradually moving into campaigning for social change. For example, CRUSADE trains all SHG members in the roles and responsibilities of the panchayats to promote awareness of the potential for change through involvement in local democracy, the panchayat system. In 2001, 23 SHG members, half of those who stood for election to the panchayats were successful. CRUSADE has also begun to tackle social issues. The SHG members have identified domestic violence, often spurred by excessive alcohol consumption, as their main problem. CRUSADE is now working with them to find ways of closing the illegal alcohol stills in the villages and to create a climate in which drinking and domestic violence are unacceptable. Child marriage is another issue that the women have elected to tackle.

Staff
CRUSADE's key staff are the women village level workers, Cluster Coordinators, each of whom looks after 20-25 SHGs in a contiguous area. These women are drawn from the communities they work with and the majority of them were initially SHG members. They therefore have an unrivalled knowledge of the area and the issues that SHG members face. These workers are supported by Programme Associates who work on literacy, income generation programmes, women's development and health

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